Public Enemy Number One
Clip 1: ‘A warning to the world’
3 min 2 sec (
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Taken from the documentary Public Enemy Number One (1981)
Original title classification not known – this clip chosen to be PG
Availability of the complete title
Curator’s clip description
Wilfred Burchett was the first journalist to report from the site of atomic devastation at Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945. He labelled the effect on human beings as ‘atomic plague’. Archival footage shows victims being treated in hospital and flattened landscape.
Teachers’ notes
provided by The Le@rning Federation
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This clip shows black-and-white scenes of the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945, shortly after the atomic bomb was dropped. These are intercut with a 1981 interview with Wilfred Burchett, a war correspondent and witness to the destruction. The devastated city and some survivors are seen, both in aerial shots and from ground level. Doctors at a hospital are shown treating patients, whose radiation injuries are graphically depicted.
Educational value points
- The subject of Public Enemy Number One is the controversial Australian journalist and war correspondent Wilfred Burchett. While working for the Daily Express, Burchett (1911–83) scooped the world with his reporting from Hiroshima in September 1945 in direct defiance of US General MacArthur’s orders and military censors. Following the dropping of the atomic bomb, MacArthur had declared southern Japan off limits to foreign journalists, but Burchett ignored the ban and travelled 30 hours by train to see for himself what had occurred. Even as an experienced war correspondent, the devastation he saw at Hiroshima shocked him. His article ‘The atomic plague’ brought the human suffering caused by radiation sickness to public notice for the first time. MacArthur ordered Burchett be expelled from Japan.
- Public Enemy Number One gives insight into Burchett’s motives in covering wars from the enemy’s point of view. Burchett spent most of his career as a foreign correspondent, reporting from war zones and international trouble spots, and frequently took an independent stance on international events. During the Korean War, Burchett reported from the North Korean side, and during the Vietnam War his friendship with Ho Chi Minh allowed him to report with the communist Viet Cong forces (Burchett was 60 at the time). Claims that he was a communist and a traitor led to Burchett being denied an Australian passport for 17 years.
- The clip shows Japan in the aftermath of the first of the two atomic bombs dropped by the USA in a bid to hasten the end of the Second World War. US President Harry S Truman made the decision to drop the atomic bombs on Japan following the high number of casualties sustained during the Battle for Okinawa, in which more than 12,000 US and 110,000 Japanese soldiers died. Hiroshima was chosen as a target because it was considered to be a military city, took up a large area over which the effects of the bomb could be easily observed, and was believed to hold no Allied POWs. On 6 August 1945 the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, followed by the Nagasaki bomb three days later. On 14 August Japan signed an unconditional surrender.
- The clip shows some of the effects of the atomic bomb on the human population and infrastructure of Hiroshima. No-one knew what the consequences would be when the US B29 bomber Enola Gay released the atomic bomb ‘Little Boy’ from 9,000 m above the city. It is estimated that of a population of approximately 300,000 people, between 90,000 and 140,000 died on the day and over the next four months. Approximately 90 per cent of Hiroshima’s buildings were either severely damaged or totally destroyed, and the radius of total destruction was about 1.6 km.
- Arriving in Hiroshima 30 days after the bomb was dropped, Burchett saw effects of radiation that had never been seen before. The bomb used at Hiroshima was a uranium weapon with a particularly high ionising radiation yield, which is very damaging to the human body. When the body is exposed to high levels of ionising radiation, it cannot combat the damage caused by soft and hard tissue absorbing the radiation. Symptoms of radiation sickness do not usually show immediately following exposure.
- Public Enemy Number One is an example of the work of much-awarded Australian filmmaker David Bradbury. An early job as a radio journalist with the ABC quickly led Bradbury (1951–) into a career as a freelance journalist, covering revolutions in Portugal and Greece. He made his name through the first-ever interview with the Free Papua Movement in 1977. His first documentary films depicted the lives and careers of two independent and uncompromising Australian journalists, news cameraman Neil Davis and Wilfred Burchett, and explored the role of the war correspondent. Other films have supported popular causes and exposed political corruption and injustice, earning him an international reputation for fearless reporting.
